nM QVnXP3Xw - Remote — United States

About ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo is a Go-To-Market Intelligence Platform that helps businesses grow through AI-ready insights, trusted data, and advanced automation. Its solutions provide more than 35,000 companies worldwide with a comprehensive view of their customers.

About the Role

ZoomInfo is seeking a Principal Machine Learning Engineer to define the technical direction of its AI intelligence platform. This is a senior individual contributor role with no direct reports, focused on data graphs, entity resolution, buying intent, and the context used by AI agents.

You will lead complex machine learning initiatives, establish evaluation standards, and make key decisions about model architecture, performance, and operating costs. The role combines hands-on engineering with technical strategy, cross-team collaboration, and mentorship.

Key Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for data graphs, entity resolution, buying intent, and AI agent context.

• Identify and prioritize complex machine learning problems and determine the right approaches to solve them.

• Develop solutions for challenges such as extracting information from companies with limited public data and identifying buying intent at web scale.

• Establish model evaluation standards, including sampling methods, human labeling, validated LLM judges, and release criteria.

• Define data contracts between data graphs, intent signals, and the AI agents that use them, including agent memory.

• Ensure machine learning systems remain cost-effective across large datasets.

• Establish shared model baselines, uncertainty reporting standards, and performance metrics across teams.

• Lead technical design reviews and mentor senior engineers.

• Contribute to hiring decisions and represent the team's technical direction to product and business leadership.

• Make decisions about model training and serving costs, including when to use self-hosted models, model distillation, or hosted AI services.

• Build and maintain production machine learning systems using Python, SQL, and distributed data processing technologies.

Required Qualifications

• Experience setting technical direction as an individual contributor across multiple teams.

• Proven experience building and maintaining production machine learning systems after launch.

• Broad knowledge of:

• Classical machine learning applied to large and complex tabular datasets.

• Applied statistics.

• Large-scale language processing.

• LLM agents and multi-step AI systems.

• Recognized technical depth in at least one of these areas.

• Experience establishing machine learning evaluation standards adopted by teams beyond your immediate group.

• Experience validating LLM-based evaluation methods against human-labeled results and communicating their limitations.

• A track record of improving how engineering teams build, evaluate, or measure machine learning systems.

• Experience making model training and serving cost decisions, including self-hosting, distillation, and hosted model selection.

• Strong hands-on Python programming skills.

• Strong SQL skills and experience with distributed data processing.

• Regular use of AI coding tools with careful review and validation of generated code.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with ranking and retrieval systems, including embeddings and learned reranking.

• Familiarity with retrieval evaluation metrics such as recall@k, MRR, and nDCG.

• Experience with entity resolution, knowledge graphs, or web-scale information extraction using real-world data.

• Experience training and serving open-weight models using PyTorch or equivalent frameworks.

• Knowledge of GPU capacity planning.

• Experience building memory or context systems for AI agents.

• Experience protecting LLM systems against adversarial inputs and prompt injection.

Salary & Benefits

Base Salary: $192,500–$302,500 per year.

Actual compensation depends on work location, qualifications, skills, experience, and training. Additional compensation may include:

• Bonus opportunities.

• Commission, where applicable.

• Equity compensation.

• Comprehensive employee benefits.

• Health, wellness, and lifestyle programs supporting employees and their families.

Work Arrangement

• Remote position.

• Compensation may vary depending on the employee's work location.

Equal Employment Opportunity

ZoomInfo is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Hiring decisions are based on qualifications, merit, and business needs. The company does not discriminate based on sex, race, age, color, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, disability status, religion, protected military or veteran status, medical condition, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

ZoomInfo also considers qualified candidates with criminal histories in accordance with applicable legal requirements.

For Massachusetts applicants, employers are prohibited from requiring or administering lie detector tests as a condition of employment. ZoomInfo does not administer lie detector tests to applicants in any location.